Morning birds on telephone wires talking in secret
brain language. Another 4th of May. Grew old and then.
Last night, listening at words for intimation of.
(The avid crowd. The child-teacher, sunkeneyed,
making the obvious into riddles.) But now
isn’t what it was. A green bottle with a contrary
message, washed up from destinations beyond
the vanishing point. Subtract one and add
two more. “Do we own our guilt?”
Out there where smoke rises from golem-depths,
time is the form and pressure of an art you’re merely
witness to. Like the fingers of a deaf piano tuner,
you think. And the boy with the red piano
banging its keys with tiny fists; a locked door
with a key sticking out of it: left to your own
devices, will you discover what connects them?
The midday siren – Plečnik’s giant pacemaker,
rattling and whirring. Crossing the park
someone waves. The muted now sound of a piano
from an open window – subject and countersubject –
as if: to take a stance, for or against, one thing
or another. The time of day, the inauspicious weather.
Or a habit that barely forms before everything else
depends on it.